1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to control of currency in a teller cash drawer and more specifically the control of denomination mix in such cash drawers from which money is manually and automatically dispensed and into which money is deposited.
2. Related Art
While dispensing an amount from a teller cash drawer, some banks require that the denominations within the cash drawer be monitored interactively by the computer controlling the teller workstation. This allows the institution to know not only the amount of cash present in a teller cash drawer, but the precise bill mix available for a transaction. While this helps the bank track teller cash positions more exactly, it can be a rather tiresome data entry task to require of a teller.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,611,286 by Nishimura et al. relates to a cash accounting system comprising a cash register and a cash dispenser that can be controlled by the cash register. Both the cash register and the cash dispenser have memories which keep track of the amount and denomination of the money remaining in their respective machine.
In order to assist the workstation operator such as a teller in controlling the denominations of cash in a cash drawer, a workstation may provide a display of a denomination mix of coins and bills to be returned to a consumer or customer as part of a transaction.
IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin Volume 36, No. 6B, June 1993, Page 275 describes a prompting display for assisting an operator in making correct change during a transaction. The number and denomination of money to be returned as change is displayed. In one embodiment, the display is in the form of indicators mounted in each money bin of the cash drawer.
Some teller workstations include a money dispenser attached to the computer controlled workstation to automatically dispense an amount of money in a mix of denominations for return to a consumer or bank customer as part of a transaction. The bill mixes are usually calculated using the straight top down its Approach.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,532,417 also by Nishimura et al. relates to a cash accounting system for bank window systems having a dispenser for dispensing denominations that are available in the dispenser. Also provided is a manual handling instruction unit that specifies the denomination breakdown of money to be dispensed manually in order to dispense the correct total amount.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,185,646, by Woods et al. describes a control circuit for a multi-denomination cash dispenser to dispense a denomination mix in a shortest amount of time. It also is intended to equalize wear and deplete denomination inventories at an equal rate.,
IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin Volume 27, No. 2, July 1984, Page 924 describes a minimum number of bills and coins dispensing computer method and apparatus. The program recursively calls itself as often as needed to find all possible denomination mixes that result in fewer bills and coins than that calculated by a top down method.
The above prior art does not solve a problem of how to handle unusual denominations such as commemorative denominations and foreign currencies. Further, the prior art does not describe how to prevent certain denominations from being prematurely depleted when the denominations are dispensed according to a consumers wishes while using algorithms that attempt to equalize wear and deplete denomination inventories at an equal rate as described by Woods et al. cited above.
The invention advantageously interactively monitors the amount of cash present in a teller cash drawer and in addition, the precise bill mix available for a transaction, thereby helping a financial institution to track teller cash positions more exactly, while reducing the input requirements for an operator who must hurry to serve a line of customers.
A further advantage of the invention allows an operator to conveniently respond to a consumers request for specific denominations while at the same time minimizing premature depletion of specific denominations of money.
An even further advantage of the invention is that it augments the standard topdown bill mix algorithm, which dispenses as much of each denominations it can starting with the higher denominations down to the lower ones, by correcting situations where a denomination is not an integral multiple of the next lower denomination thereby allowing a mix to be determined even when a lower denomination is depleted.
These and other advantages are obtained by the invention which provides a system and method including a programmed computer process for alleviating portions of the tedious input requirements posed by structured bill counting procedures. An interactive denomination control dialog with input assistance accepts individual denomination bill and coin quantities or amounts from the teller or operator and automatically calculates the total amount as input is received. The specific denominations of bills and coins are configurable for many different currencies.
When a specific amount of money is to be dispensed, the invention selects quantities and denominations to be dispensed. Each quantity and the amount of a denomination can be changed by a teller or other operator. After a change, the system of the invention modifies quantities of smaller denominations to be dispensed in order to dispense the specific amount.
The method and system of the invention solves the imbalance problem where an amount is to be dispensed from a cash drawer made up of a fixed number of denominations, each having an associated item quantity, by distributing the number of items dispensed from each available denomination, in a substantially even distribution across many transactions. It uses a three pass approach where the first pass tries to dispense an amount using an equal number of items from each denomination whose total is less than or equal to the required amount. Afterwards, the selected quantities of any unavailable, or nearly depleted, cash drawer denominations are reduced. It then attempts to make up any difference by using a topdown approach on the remaining total not distributed across denominations to get to the required amount.